The Weekend Economists travel the Yellow Brick Road, November 14-15.

[Demeter]

3. Well, Matt, if this is what you do extemporaneously, I'll give more notice next time!

Last edited Sat Nov 14, 2015, 11:43 AM - Edit history (1)

I had heard a bit about this allegory idea, but never in such detail.

It is very plausible, and I believe Baum confessed to it at one point. If I can track that down, I'll post it.

ON EDIT:

THIS IS A GREAT TOPIC, PERFECT FOR THE WEEKEND AT HAND! NOT TOO HEAVY, NOT TOO LIGHT, FINANCIAL BUT NOT, ETC.

(forgive and forget the sarcasm in the headline...I wasn't quite awake yet)

There's another interpretation, rather far fetched, for Oz, that involved gold vs silver (silver slippers were are clue) and the currency war that William Jennings Bryan gave the Cross of Gold speech about...but I always found that a bit strained.

The Wizard of Oz and the 1896 McKinley-Bryan Campaign

http://www.ithaca.edu/rhp/programs/cmd/blogs/posters_and_election_propaganda/the_wizard_of_oz_and_the_1896_mckinley-bryan_campa/#.VkdVL17Hn5s

In 1964, Henry Littlefield (a high school teacher in Mount Vernon, New York) published an article in the American Quarterly, which called L. Frank Baum's children's book, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (published in 1900), a political parable of the United States at the end of the nineteenth century, which focused on the election of 1896.

It was suggested by Littlefield that these Baum characters represented the following people and groups:

The Wicked Witch of the East = Eastern industrialists and bankers, who "dehumanized a simple laborer so that the faster and better he worked the more quickly he became a kind of machine," according to Littlefield.

The Munchkins = the citizens--most of whom were oppressed

The Scarecrow = the western farmers

The Tin Woodman = the downtrodden eastern workers

The Cowardly Lion = William Jennings Bryan

The Wizard = "any President from Grant to McKinley.... He symbolizes the American criterion for leadership--he is able to be everything to everybody," wrote Littlefield.

The Yellow Brick Road = the gold standard

Dorothy's silver shoes = the Democratic/Populist demand for silver coinage

The Emerald City = Washington, D.C.

Dorothy = Everyman

Other writers have added to, or challenged, Littlefield's interpretations (see David Parker's article). One, for example, noted that Dorothy's dog, Toto, represented the Prohibitionist teetotalers and that Oz was an abbreviation for "ounce." The silver advocates in 1896 had called for a 16-to-1-ounce ratio of silver to gold. Another thought Dorothy symbolized Mary Elizabeth Lease, a Populist speaker, who was thought to have told Kansas farmers to "raise less corn and more hell." Yet another thought that the book had much to do with imperialism in Asia, with The Wicked Witch of the East being President Grover Cleveland, The Wicked Witch of the West, William McKinley, and The Wizard, the latter's campaign manager, Mark Hanna. And another scholar wrote that The Wicked Witch of the West was Populism itself.

Many still think, however, that the work was mainly about the political battle between silver and gold advocates, after the Great Depression of 1893 in the United States: "Baum, a reform-minded Democrat who supported William Jennings Bryan's pro-silver candidacy, wrote the book as a parable of the Populists, an allegory of their failed efforts to reform the nation in 1896." wrote Parker about this theory...MORE

SIMILAR DEVELOPMENTS AT:

http://www.themoneymasters.com/the-wonderful-wizard-of-oz-a-monetary-reformers-brief-symbol-glossary/